In certain types of image sensors, when there is a defect in a pixel of such sensor it causes a line of pixels in a digital image to have corrupt data. This happens during the transfer of electrons corresponding to pixels when such electrons are transferred through the defective pixel. An example of this situation is a full frame image sensor. In a typical full frame image sensor after an image is captured, electrons stored in the pixels of such sensor are transferred a line at a time through the pixels of the image sensor. A defective pixel will corrupt data stored in the electrons of subsequent pixels which pass throught it. This causes a line of corrupted pixel data. In a full frame image sensor, a column defect is an anomaly in the structure of an image sensor that prevents the vertical transfer of pixel charge packets. As a consequence, none of the affected pixels in the column can provide valid image information. If left untreated, this condition would produce a partial height or a full height vertical line artifact running through the image. The current method of concealing a column defect is to average nearest horizontal neighbors of the same filter type. In a standard color filter array (CFA), for example, the Bayer CFA pattern shown in commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 3,971,065, that means averaging the pixel two positions to the left with the pixel two positions to the right. While this method works well enough for the vast majority of pixels, it fails to properly handle corrupted pixels in certain image contexts, such as high contrast diagonal edges. In addition, when the current method fails, it doesn't fail gracefully, but rather with opposing vertical spikes of spurious color.